Alan Turing Institute Partnership

The Alan Turing Institute is the UK’s national institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. In recognition of its world class academic research, the University of Leeds has been a partner of the Institute since 2018. Here we have picked out a few highlights from 2022.

Data Study Group Reports published

In the summer of 2021 LIDA hosted its first LIDA-Turing Data Group. LIDA business partners and collaborators put forward a series of ‘data challenges’ that were addressed by challenge teams of analytics and artificial intelligence experts. Drawn from institutions across the globe more than 70 data scientists, largely from academia but including some from the private sector, took part. The findings made by the research teams have subsequently been documented in a series of reports that are available on the ATI website. The DSG focused on urban, geospatial and consumer data.

Network Rail: Automatic detection of counterfort drains
Ordnance Survey Northern Ireland (OSNI): Leveraging LiDAR and Street View Data for road feature detection with OSNI
ASDA: Exploring and quantifying the effect of weather on sales
Sainsbury’s: Investigating the impact of the UK’s Soft Drinks Industry Levy on consumers’ purchases of soft drinks
Morrisons: Optimising the supply chain to minimise waste and delivery mileage

Collaboration Event

In July 2022 LIDA hosted a LIDA – Alan Turing Institute Data Centre Collaboration Event led by Turing Fellow and Professor of Technologies & Informatics, Susan Grant-Muller. Many of society’s most significant problems are multifaceted and as such require analysis of multiple rich data spanning many sectors and sources to generate insights and potential policy solutions. The LIDA event brought together currently disparate research teams from across the UK data infrastructure landscape, with the goal to explore how collaboration could create synergies and engender societal benefits.

Teams discussed the challenges, opportunities and next steps needed for improved data collaboration. During the event specific case examples of how collaboration could serve to improve big societal challenges, as well as examples of synergies arising from hands-on co-analysis of currently detached data, were considered. Ideas and dialogue initiated at the event are leading to co-authored outputs and improved longer term networks between those working with rich data.

Key event collaborators included Alison Heppenstall, Professor of Geocomputation at Glasgow, and Rachel Franklin, Turing Fellow and Professor of Geographical Analysis at the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies, Newcastle.

New Turing awards to Leeds staff and students

Post-Doctoral Enrichment Awards 2022

In 2022 the Turing launched the Post-Doctoral Enrichment Award Scheme designed to engage and connect the UK’s postdoctoral community working on topics related to data science and AI. The award provides development opportunities in three key areas: learning new skills, collaboration, and developing research independence. Thirteen such awards (see below) were made to Leeds staff during 2021/22, the scheme’s inaugural year.

Post-doctoral Researcher	School
Shoma Kitayama	Civil Engineering
Wisdom Agboh, Renyu Yang, Rafael Papallas, Noorhan Abbas	Computing
Yuanxuan Yang, Yanis Boussad	Institute for Transport Studies
Chris Hayward, Kieran Zucker, Oliver Todd	Medicine
Nicole Nisbett	Politics and International Studies
Tamara Fletcher, Benjamin Davison	Earth and Environment

PhD Community Awards 2022

This year saw the introduction of the new Turing PhD Enrichment Community Award. Eleven of the 50 grants made in this first year of the scheme were awarded to University of Leeds students, with representation from each of the University’s faculties (see below).

Doctoral Researcher	School
Nouran Khallaf	Languages, Cultures and Societies
Emily Clarke	Medicine
Jack Breen, Lucy Godson, Sian Carey	Computing
Amber Emmett	Biological Sciences
Sally Wilson, Trystan Surawy-Stepney	Earth and Environment
Ramesh Nadarajah	LIDA
William Sheppard	Psychology
Russell Martin	Leeds University Business School

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